its a simple render test of maya sprites in arnold and renderman Studio. it uses a simple noise pattern on a 2d ramp with 2d ramp displacement. one simple noise plugged into a ramp can give a really complex shading behaviour. the extreme displacement come from a simple ramp, this give the smoke more depth.

i’ve wrote 2 handy tools in maya for getting a speed value from animated Objects. it works on everything, which have a transform node. Locators, Geo etc…

this script add an extra attribute call Speed. its updates live, even when change keyframes. its very hand if you have to animate your force field based on speed /animation of other Objects. you can simply refer this attribude inside other expression.

this second script is pretty much the same, except it display the speed live in Maya’s HUB display. (inside a viewport)

nonlinear deformers or scuplting on geo/partilces are great to tweak your sims. but it will not written into the cache file. the deformation gets always added on top of the cache. this is little bumpy, example: if wanna use the deformed nParticle to emitt into a fluids container.
in this case, you can use the new node editor to plug the outGeometry of the deformer into you depending geo/nodes like the fluids emitters. easy !